Don’t play innocent. If you’re a non-lawyer in the 2020s, you’ve at least had the passing thought that you could use an LLM to help you generate a killer lawsuit against someone who pissed you off.
Or at least now I know it’s not just me.
Thanks to AI, plaintiffs representing themselves, also known as “pro se” plaintiffs, are changing the legal landscape for the worse, according to a new study by MIT’s Anand Shah and USC’s Joshua Levy, reported on by the New York Times on Monday. The study has not yet been peer reviewed.
It says that since the rollout of widely available LLMs, 18 percent of pro se filings now contain what the authors have deemed AI-generated text. Perhaps consequently, “the total volume of pro se docket entries per court in the first 180 days of a case has grown by 64% on average across the post-AI period,” the study finds.
Typically, pro se filings come from prisoners working on their cases from behind bars, but the study notes that “national non-prisoner pro se filing share rose sharply from its approximately 11% historical steady state to 16.8% in fiscal year 2025, a gain that has no precedent in 25 years of administrative records.”
According to the Times, pro se plaintiffs lost 96% of their cases from 1998-2017.
The Times is largely spotlighting frivolous lawsuits generated with AI—and what a waste of time it is for the courts to painstakingly read and process all these slop-filled filings. A Minnesota federal judge named Patrick J. Schiltz, called it “an existential threat to the federal courts.”
To illustrate their point, the Times interviewed a man who uses AI to generate lawsuits. This person gave the paper his name, and allowed himself to be photographed for the story. Courts have alleged some unsavory things about this person, and the Times says he lives in his car. He is, to use one of the president’s favorite terms, straight from central casting—so much so that the Times’ story borders on, well, mean.
I can’t dispute that AI lawsuits sound like a massive problem. At the same time, lawsuits are often the only weapon downtrodden Americans have—a substitute for institutions and politicians that actually help make us whole when we’re harmed and it’s not our fault. Part of me can’t help but long to read a David and Goliath story about a rando armed with Claude who bootstraps their way to some life-changing, ten-figure legal victory—presumably after using the LLM to figure out how to argue a case in a courtroom as well.
#Random #People #Armed #Lawyer #Reportedly #Filling #Judicial #Dockets #LawsuitsArtificial intelligence,lawsuits">Random People Armed with AI and No Lawyer Are Reportedly Filling Judicial Dockets with Lawsuits
Don’t play innocent. If you’re a non-lawyer in the 2020s, you’ve at least had the passing thought that you could use an LLM to help you generate a killer lawsuit against someone who pissed you off.
Or at least now I know it’s not just me.
Thanks to AI, plaintiffs representing themselves, also known as “pro se” plaintiffs, are changing the legal landscape for the worse, according to a new study by MIT’s Anand Shah and USC’s Joshua Levy, reported on by the New York Times on Monday. The study has not yet been peer reviewed.
It says that since the rollout of widely available LLMs, 18 percent of pro se filings now contain what the authors have deemed AI-generated text. Perhaps consequently, “the total volume of pro se docket entries per court in the first 180 days of a case has grown by 64% on average across the post-AI period,” the study finds.
Typically, pro se filings come from prisoners working on their cases from behind bars, but the study notes that “national non-prisoner pro se filing share rose sharply from its approximately 11% historical steady state to 16.8% in fiscal year 2025, a gain that has no precedent in 25 years of administrative records.”
According to the Times, pro se plaintiffs lost 96% of their cases from 1998-2017.
The Times is largely spotlighting frivolous lawsuits generated with AI—and what a waste of time it is for the courts to painstakingly read and process all these slop-filled filings. A Minnesota federal judge named Patrick J. Schiltz, called it “an existential threat to the federal courts.”
To illustrate their point, the Times interviewed a man who uses AI to generate lawsuits. This person gave the paper his name, and allowed himself to be photographed for the story. Courts have alleged some unsavory things about this person, and the Times says he lives in his car. He is, to use one of the president’s favorite terms, straight from central casting—so much so that the Times’ story borders on, well, mean.
I can’t dispute that AI lawsuits sound like a massive problem. At the same time, lawsuits are often the only weapon downtrodden Americans have—a substitute for institutions and politicians that actually help make us whole when we’re harmed and it’s not our fault. Part of me can’t help but long to read a David and Goliath story about a rando armed with Claude who bootstraps their way to some life-changing, ten-figure legal victory—presumably after using the LLM to figure out how to argue a case in a courtroom as well.
#Random #People #Armed #Lawyer #Reportedly #Filling #Judicial #Dockets #LawsuitsArtificial intelligence,lawsuits
Don’t play innocent. If you’re a non-lawyer in the 2020s, you’ve at least had the passing thought that you could use an LLM to help you generate a killer lawsuit against someone who pissed you off.
Or at least now I know it’s not just me.
Thanks to AI, plaintiffs representing themselves, also known as “pro se” plaintiffs, are changing the legal landscape for the worse, according to a new study by MIT’s Anand Shah and USC’s Joshua Levy, reported on by the New York Times on Monday. The study has not yet been peer reviewed.
It says that since the rollout of widely available LLMs, 18 percent of pro se filings now contain what the authors have deemed AI-generated text. Perhaps consequently, “the total volume of pro se docket entries per court in the first 180 days of a case has grown by 64% on average across the post-AI period,” the study finds.
Typically, pro se filings come from prisoners working on their cases from behind bars, but the study notes that “national non-prisoner pro se filing share rose sharply from its approximately 11% historical steady state to 16.8% in fiscal year 2025, a gain that has no precedent in 25 years of administrative records.”
According to the Times, pro se plaintiffs lost 96% of their cases from 1998-2017.
The Times is largely spotlighting frivolous lawsuits generated with AI—and what a waste of time it is for the courts to painstakingly read and process all these slop-filled filings. A Minnesota federal judge named Patrick J. Schiltz, called it “an existential threat to the federal courts.”
To illustrate their point, the Times interviewed a man who uses AI to generate lawsuits. This person gave the paper his name, and allowed himself to be photographed for the story. Courts have alleged some unsavory things about this person, and the Times says he lives in his car. He is, to use one of the president’s favorite terms, straight from central casting—so much so that the Times’ story borders on, well, mean.
I can’t dispute that AI lawsuits sound like a massive problem. At the same time, lawsuits are often the only weapon downtrodden Americans have—a substitute for institutions and politicians that actually help make us whole when we’re harmed and it’s not our fault. Part of me can’t help but long to read a David and Goliath story about a rando armed with Claude who bootstraps their way to some life-changing, ten-figure legal victory—presumably after using the LLM to figure out how to argue a case in a courtroom as well.
Don’t play innocent. If you’re a non-lawyer in the 2020s, you’ve at least had the passing thought that you could use an LLM to help you generate a killer lawsuit against someone who pissed you off.
Or at least now I know it’s not just me.
Thanks to AI, plaintiffs representing themselves, also known as “pro se” plaintiffs, are changing the legal landscape for the worse, according to a new study by MIT’s Anand Shah and USC’s Joshua Levy, reported on by the New York Times on Monday. The study has not yet been peer reviewed.
It says that since the rollout of widely available LLMs, 18 percent of pro se filings now contain what the authors have deemed AI-generated text. Perhaps consequently, “the total volume of pro se docket entries per court in the first 180 days of a case has grown by 64% on average across the post-AI period,” the study finds.
Typically, pro se filings come from prisoners working on their cases from behind bars, but the study notes that “national non-prisoner pro se filing share rose sharply from its approximately 11% historical steady state to 16.8% in fiscal year 2025, a gain that has no precedent in 25 years of administrative records.”
According to the Times, pro se plaintiffs lost 96% of their cases from 1998-2017.
The Times is largely spotlighting frivolous lawsuits generated with AI—and what a waste of time it is for the courts to painstakingly read and process all these slop-filled filings. A Minnesota federal judge named Patrick J. Schiltz, called it “an existential threat to the federal courts.”
To illustrate their point, the Times interviewed a man who uses AI to generate lawsuits. This person gave the paper his name, and allowed himself to be photographed for the story. Courts have alleged some unsavory things about this person, and the Times says he lives in his car. He is, to use one of the president’s favorite terms, straight from central casting—so much so that the Times’ story borders on, well, mean.
I can’t dispute that AI lawsuits sound like a massive problem. At the same time, lawsuits are often the only weapon downtrodden Americans have—a substitute for institutions and politicians that actually help make us whole when we’re harmed and it’s not our fault. Part of me can’t help but long to read a David and Goliath story about a rando armed with Claude who bootstraps their way to some life-changing, ten-figure legal victory—presumably after using the LLM to figure out how to argue a case in a courtroom as well.
Don’t play innocent. If you’re a non-lawyer in the 2020s, you’ve at least had the…
![John Grisham’s New Legal Drama Is a Real Life Fight Against AI Audiobooks on YouTube
There’s an argument to be made that audiobooks are the finest form of content. You take a book—already off to a good start—and you get to have someone read it right into your ears. And when I say “someone” I mean the GOATs in the voice game. I could cite examples of celebrities you never knew narrated audiobooks, but here’s a sample of Werner Herzog narrating his memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All that I think speaks for itself: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4IQSvi3pXU[/embed] What could be better than this? Not only are audiobooks heaven, you can probably get all the audiobooks you want for free (and legally) by getting yourself a library card and using your local library’s preferred app (Libby, perhaps). I say all that, because given all the easy and free access to high quality audiobooks, why in the world would anyone listen to a John Grisham audiobook presented like this?
Don’t click that link. Instead of the actual audiobook, which is read wonderfully by Michael Beck, it will take you to a YouTube video consisting of an AI narrator reading Grisham’s recent hit novel the Widow, and the narration plays under 13 hours of AI slop video—simulated stock footage of fake vacations, basically. It looks like the video they display under the lyrics on Hell’s karaoke machine. I don’t have any science to back this up, but it will definitely give you brain cancer.
As the New York Times points out, 80,000 lost souls listened to the Widow this way. And Grisham is pissed about it. “The thieves and pirates who steal my work and try to profit from it, in any format, should be punished civilly and criminally […] And in this particular example, YouTube is complicit because it’s clear they know what is happening and refuse to stop it,” Grisham told the Times in an email. He should really write about this. YouTube, for its part, says the video is still up because there hasn’t been a takedown request, and that it doesn’t proactively police for copyright violations. “For more than two decades, we’ve built systems that help rights holders manage and control their copyrighted content — investing continuously to make sure those systems evolve as new threats emerge,” Jack Malon, a YouTube spokesperson, wrote to the Times.
If you’ve ever had a YouTube video flagged for a copyright violation, it may have been because of a feature called Content ID that music publishers absolutely love. It allows copyright holders to crawl YouTube and automatically detect copyrighted content. At times, Content ID has been a valuable moneymaking scheme for copyright holders, who were able to zero in on incidental—or even accidental—uses of copyrighted material, especially music, and by making a claim, monetize other people’s videos. It can’t do this anymore, but this is the sort of thing YouTube’s copyright system has been designed to support. As the Times points out, Content ID isn’t great at finding AI-narrated audiobooks. The audio waveform of the content is not the same as the audio the publisher owns, which makes it tricky to know what to even scan for. The author holds a copyright on the text, which can be slightly changed by the creator of the YouTube video while still leaving the book largely intact—good enough for casual listeners anyway. This leaves publishers and authors to navigate the takedown process manually, which seems, judging from the fact that the Widow is still up, to just not be happening.
That’s a pity. And I don’t mean because it’s robbing John Grisham of audiobook sales, which is bad, but not the gravest injustice in the universe. It’s bad because people are listening to such horrible garbage just because it’s available. And they really, truly, don’t have to. #John #Grishams #Legal #Drama #Real #Life #Fight #Audiobooks #YouTubeArtificial intelligence,Audiobooks,Books,intellectual proper John Grisham’s New Legal Drama Is a Real Life Fight Against AI Audiobooks on YouTube
There’s an argument to be made that audiobooks are the finest form of content. You take a book—already off to a good start—and you get to have someone read it right into your ears. And when I say “someone” I mean the GOATs in the voice game. I could cite examples of celebrities you never knew narrated audiobooks, but here’s a sample of Werner Herzog narrating his memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All that I think speaks for itself: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4IQSvi3pXU[/embed] What could be better than this? Not only are audiobooks heaven, you can probably get all the audiobooks you want for free (and legally) by getting yourself a library card and using your local library’s preferred app (Libby, perhaps). I say all that, because given all the easy and free access to high quality audiobooks, why in the world would anyone listen to a John Grisham audiobook presented like this?
Don’t click that link. Instead of the actual audiobook, which is read wonderfully by Michael Beck, it will take you to a YouTube video consisting of an AI narrator reading Grisham’s recent hit novel the Widow, and the narration plays under 13 hours of AI slop video—simulated stock footage of fake vacations, basically. It looks like the video they display under the lyrics on Hell’s karaoke machine. I don’t have any science to back this up, but it will definitely give you brain cancer.
As the New York Times points out, 80,000 lost souls listened to the Widow this way. And Grisham is pissed about it. “The thieves and pirates who steal my work and try to profit from it, in any format, should be punished civilly and criminally […] And in this particular example, YouTube is complicit because it’s clear they know what is happening and refuse to stop it,” Grisham told the Times in an email. He should really write about this. YouTube, for its part, says the video is still up because there hasn’t been a takedown request, and that it doesn’t proactively police for copyright violations. “For more than two decades, we’ve built systems that help rights holders manage and control their copyrighted content — investing continuously to make sure those systems evolve as new threats emerge,” Jack Malon, a YouTube spokesperson, wrote to the Times.
If you’ve ever had a YouTube video flagged for a copyright violation, it may have been because of a feature called Content ID that music publishers absolutely love. It allows copyright holders to crawl YouTube and automatically detect copyrighted content. At times, Content ID has been a valuable moneymaking scheme for copyright holders, who were able to zero in on incidental—or even accidental—uses of copyrighted material, especially music, and by making a claim, monetize other people’s videos. It can’t do this anymore, but this is the sort of thing YouTube’s copyright system has been designed to support. As the Times points out, Content ID isn’t great at finding AI-narrated audiobooks. The audio waveform of the content is not the same as the audio the publisher owns, which makes it tricky to know what to even scan for. The author holds a copyright on the text, which can be slightly changed by the creator of the YouTube video while still leaving the book largely intact—good enough for casual listeners anyway. This leaves publishers and authors to navigate the takedown process manually, which seems, judging from the fact that the Widow is still up, to just not be happening.
That’s a pity. And I don’t mean because it’s robbing John Grisham of audiobook sales, which is bad, but not the gravest injustice in the universe. It’s bad because people are listening to such horrible garbage just because it’s available. And they really, truly, don’t have to. #John #Grishams #Legal #Drama #Real #Life #Fight #Audiobooks #YouTubeArtificial intelligence,Audiobooks,Books,intellectual proper](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/05/john-grisham-1280x853.jpg)

![Your Doctor Is Most Likely Consulting This Free AI Chatbot, Report Says
How would you like it if, when stumped or just in need of some help with an unfamiliar situation, your doctor consulted a free, ad-supported AI chatbot? That’s not actually a hypothetical. They probably are doing that, a new report from NBC News says. It’s called OpenEvidence, and NBC says it was “used by about 65% of U.S. doctors across almost 27 million clinical encounters in April alone.” An earlier Bloomberg report on OpenEvidence from seven months ago said it had signed up 50% of American doctors at the time—so reported growth is rapid.
The OpenEvidence homepage trumpets the bot as “America’s Official Medical Knowledge Platform,” and says healthcare professionals qualify for unlimited free use, but non-doctors can try it for free without creating accounts. It gives long, detailed answers with extensive citations that superficially look—to me, a non-doctor—trustworthy and credible. NBC interviewed doctors for its story, and apparently pressed them on how often they actually click those links to the sources of information, and “most said they only do so when they get an unexpected result,” NBC’s report says.
While it’s free, OpenEvidence is not a charity. It’s a Miami-headquartered tech unicorn with a billionaire founder named David Nadler, and as of January it boasted a billion valuation. NBC says it’s backed by some of the all stars of Sand Hill Road: Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, along with Google Ventures, Thrive Capital, and Nvidia.
And its revenue comes from ads (for now), which NBC says are often for “pharmaceutical and medical device companies.” I’m not capable of stress testing such a piece of software, but I kicked the tires slightly by asking Claude to generate doctor’s notes that are very bad and irresponsible (I said it was just a movie prop). ©OpenEvidence When I told OpenEvidence those were my notes and asked it to make sure they were good, thankfully, it confirmed that they were bad, saying in part:
“This clinical documentation raises serious patient safety concerns. The presentation described contains multiple red flags for subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) that appear to have been insufficiently weighted, and the current management plan could result in significant harm.” So that’s somewhat comforting. On the other hand, according to NBC: “[…]some healthcare providers were quick to point out that OpenEvidence occasionally flubbed or exaggerated its answers, particularly on rare conditions or in ‘edge’ cases.” NBC’s report also clocked some worries within the medical community and elsewhere, in particular, a “lack of rigorous scientific studies on the tool’s patient impact,” and signs that OpenEvidence might be stunting the intellectual development of recent med school grads: “One midcareer doctor in Missouri, who requested anonymity given the limited number of providers in their medical field in the country, said he was already seeing the detrimental effects of OpenEvidence on students’ ability to sort signals from noise. ‘My worry is that when we introduce a new tool, any kind of tool that is doing part of your skills that you had trained up for a while beforehand, you start losing those skills pretty quickly” At a recent doctor’s appointment, my doctor asked my permission to use an AI tool on their phone (I don’t know if it was OpenEvidence). I didn’t know what to say other than yes. Do I want that for my doctor’s appointment? Not especially. But if my doctor has come to rely on a tool like this, then what am I supposed to do? Take away their crutch? #Doctor #Consulting #Free #Chatbot #ReportArtificial intelligence,doctors,Medicine Your Doctor Is Most Likely Consulting This Free AI Chatbot, Report Says
How would you like it if, when stumped or just in need of some help with an unfamiliar situation, your doctor consulted a free, ad-supported AI chatbot? That’s not actually a hypothetical. They probably are doing that, a new report from NBC News says. It’s called OpenEvidence, and NBC says it was “used by about 65% of U.S. doctors across almost 27 million clinical encounters in April alone.” An earlier Bloomberg report on OpenEvidence from seven months ago said it had signed up 50% of American doctors at the time—so reported growth is rapid.
The OpenEvidence homepage trumpets the bot as “America’s Official Medical Knowledge Platform,” and says healthcare professionals qualify for unlimited free use, but non-doctors can try it for free without creating accounts. It gives long, detailed answers with extensive citations that superficially look—to me, a non-doctor—trustworthy and credible. NBC interviewed doctors for its story, and apparently pressed them on how often they actually click those links to the sources of information, and “most said they only do so when they get an unexpected result,” NBC’s report says.
While it’s free, OpenEvidence is not a charity. It’s a Miami-headquartered tech unicorn with a billionaire founder named David Nadler, and as of January it boasted a billion valuation. NBC says it’s backed by some of the all stars of Sand Hill Road: Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, along with Google Ventures, Thrive Capital, and Nvidia.
And its revenue comes from ads (for now), which NBC says are often for “pharmaceutical and medical device companies.” I’m not capable of stress testing such a piece of software, but I kicked the tires slightly by asking Claude to generate doctor’s notes that are very bad and irresponsible (I said it was just a movie prop). ©OpenEvidence When I told OpenEvidence those were my notes and asked it to make sure they were good, thankfully, it confirmed that they were bad, saying in part:
“This clinical documentation raises serious patient safety concerns. The presentation described contains multiple red flags for subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) that appear to have been insufficiently weighted, and the current management plan could result in significant harm.” So that’s somewhat comforting. On the other hand, according to NBC: “[…]some healthcare providers were quick to point out that OpenEvidence occasionally flubbed or exaggerated its answers, particularly on rare conditions or in ‘edge’ cases.” NBC’s report also clocked some worries within the medical community and elsewhere, in particular, a “lack of rigorous scientific studies on the tool’s patient impact,” and signs that OpenEvidence might be stunting the intellectual development of recent med school grads: “One midcareer doctor in Missouri, who requested anonymity given the limited number of providers in their medical field in the country, said he was already seeing the detrimental effects of OpenEvidence on students’ ability to sort signals from noise. ‘My worry is that when we introduce a new tool, any kind of tool that is doing part of your skills that you had trained up for a while beforehand, you start losing those skills pretty quickly” At a recent doctor’s appointment, my doctor asked my permission to use an AI tool on their phone (I don’t know if it was OpenEvidence). I didn’t know what to say other than yes. Do I want that for my doctor’s appointment? Not especially. But if my doctor has come to rely on a tool like this, then what am I supposed to do? Take away their crutch? #Doctor #Consulting #Free #Chatbot #ReportArtificial intelligence,doctors,Medicine](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-13-at-8.02.01 PM.jpg)


